TRUMPadelphia: The Amtrak crash and the infrastructure bill

Cars from an Amtrak train that derailed lie spilled onto Interstate 5, Monday, Dec. 18, 2017, in DuPont, Wash. The Amtrak train making the first-ever run along a faster new route hurtled off the overpass Monday near Tacoma and spilled some of its cars onto the highway below, killing several people, authorities said. (Bettina Hansen/The Seattle Times via AP)

Bettina Hansen

Good morning, pals. There's a robot Trump in Disney World, a tax bill about to pass Congress and an infrastructure bill on the horizon that the president is highlighting in the wake of a devastating Amtrak crash.

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What’s at stake

An Amtrak train crashed in Washington state yesterday, killing at least three people. The images from the site are horrific, the interviews with survivors even more so, and, as it's early days, it's still unclear what exactly caused the crash, though investigators have determined the train was speeding.

The 2015 derailment, investigators concluded, could have been prevented if a speed control system had been installed on the Port Richmond tracks. That system has already been installed on the line where the Washington train crashed — but it won't be turned on until next year.

What’s ahead

That brings us to whether Trump's infrastructure plan applies at all here. The Washington crash happened on a brand-new stretch of tracks, paid for by stimulus funds from 2009. And Trump, judging by his policy priorities so far, has shown little commitment with railways in the first place.

And the infrastructure plan itself is still mostly talking points, said Erick Guerra, a city planning professor at Penn: "The substance of the plan is rhetoric, and then slashing a few programs and agencies," he said. "I haven't seen very much evidence that he thinks very thoughtfully about these issues, other than saying, 'We have the worst infrastructure and we need the best infrastructure.'" And, because it's 2017 and literally nothing is a bipartisan issue anymore, it's unclear whether this plan even gets through Congress.

What they’re saying

"From the beginning, America has been defined by its people." — The opening line from the recently-unveiled Donald Trump animatronic in Disney World's Hall of Presidents, dashing my hopes for a robot that just yelled Trump tweets while the Lincoln robot tried to deliver the Gettysburg Address. Go bland or go home, I guess.

"I was an easy pickup. Very easy pickup. And a couple, two, three other Democrats would have been easy pickups, if they had just made an effort." — Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin, of West Virginia, saying that if Republicans had tried harder to reach across the aisle, they might have gotten a few Democrats on board with their deeply unpopular tax bill.

"Let's get on with the real issues that are facing people of this country right now, and I don't think that the President ought to resign at this point." — newly-elected Alabama Sen. Doug Jones, who defeated Republican Roy Moore in a nail-biter last week, already breaking with some of his Democratic colleagues in the Senate who have called for Trump to resign over the allegations of sexual harassment that surfaced during the campaign.

PA state Sen. Daylin Leach is "taking a step back" from his campaign after allegations he engaged in inappropriate sexual talk and unwelcome touching with staffers surfaced in the Inquirer this weekend.